The Night My Daughter Sang Our 9/11 Song (2013)

How “The Birds Don’t Know” was born, and the memory it still carries from that September evening

The Birds Don’t Know

It was one of those strange convergences that only life can arrange. On Wednesday, September 11, 2013, Maxine was fifteen years old, already writing and performing her own songs, and that night she was the featured performer at Wednesday Night Poetry in Hot Springs — the longest-running weekly poetry open mic in the country. The date itself carried its own gravity: the twelfth anniversary of 9/11.

Earlier that year, she and a young musician named Jesus had been noodling on guitar in my living room while I cooked in the kitchen. He kept circling a melody, soft and insistent, and I could hear the words rising out of it before anyone had spoken them aloud. I told him, “I can hear the lyrics in it.” And I began to shape them, pulling from my own memory of that day in 2001 — the endless loop of television images, the fear that lingered in the air, and then stepping outside to see birds and squirrels moving as if nothing had changed.

That’s where the title came from: The Birds Don’t Know. They don’t know that the towers have fallen. They don’t know the world has cracked open. They just go on.

Maxine turned those words into a song. She found the guitar work difficult, so she insisted Jesus accompany her. She even made him sing the chorus with her. That night at Wednesday Night Poetry, she stood on stage wearing a Banksy t-shirt he had bought her — the one with the girl and the bomb, or maybe it was a mushroom cloud. It was stark and haunting, the kind of art that makes you look twice.

And then she sang. My song, their song, a song born from the collision of memory and melody. The audience held still, listening, while outside the world was still remembering its own grief.

For me, it was one of those moments you never forget: my daughter’s voice carrying words that had once been just a thought in my head, lifted into the air on the anniversary of the very day they described.

The birds didn’t know. But we did. And for a few minutes that night, we remembered together.